After a sting operation goes bad, gunfire erupts on the streets of Hong Kong as police chase a group of suspects across town. Unfortunately, the melee is caught on camera by the media and when the criminals humiliate a police officer live on national television and escape, the public outrage towards the police department is mutinous.
The leader of the sting operation, Inspector Cheung (Nick Cheung, Election), furious from losing the criminals, disobeys orders from his commanding officer and stays hot on the heels of the bandits. Chased into a residential apartment block, the villains take a family hostage and bunker down to plan their next move. Cheung tries to roust the criminals out from within, but is unable to single-handedly defuse the situation. Meanwhile, the police swarm around the building and set up a command center outside, led by ambitious and media-savvy Commissioner Rebecca Fong (Kelly Chen, Infernal Affairs), who seems more concerned about the swarm of video cameras and photographers than the criminals inside the building.
Embarrassed by their earlier defeat, the police begin fighting a public relations war, anxious to repair their tattered image in the public eye. In order to portray the department in a favorable, decisive light, they begin feeding "punched-up" video clips to the media, carefully edited to show the police coming out on top in the conflict with the criminals, as they keep the press updated on every move they make. Unfortunately for the police, the bad guys need only to turn on their television and are immediately brought up to speed on every detail about the police activity, keeping one step ahead of the police at all times…
